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Mother blamed the new 'bad' behavior of people on the pill. Condoms and French Letters were fine, but they still belonged to men. The pill, for the first time, put behavioral choices in the hands of women. What power! How liberating that was.

I don't think mother objected so much to the liberty of sexual behavior, as to the lack of consequence and the break down of accepted behaviors between men and women. In old China, if you got pregnant outside of marriage, you could be asked to jump in a well and drown. Today, in certain Middle East countries, you could be killed for ruining the purity of your family's name. In places in Europe not so long ago, as well as here in the States, you might have been sent to a home for wayward girls. The consequences of sexual relations were definitely dire and certainly a damper on acting on your urges.

The pill certainly changed that. The whole idea that you could enjoy sex and not consider yourself a bad, filthy person, was and probably still is, a revolutionary idea. The idea of touch itself is still dangerous. Oh, bless those Puritans! People need touch. Remember those abandoned babies in Ceausesu's Romania? These babies were housed in orphanages where they were not held or touched or physically loved. They died. Closer to home, we heard of a woman offended by being bumped by a kid. It was a 9 year old black kid. She made a scene and tried to call the police. OMG. Brings back images of Southern women accusing Black men of rape when it never happened and having these hapless men hanged.

The pill or not, touch and sex are still too taboo to talk about openly. Still too taboo to not condemn or vilify the physical, the body. And yet, it seems we are obsessed with the subject. Face those Pilgrims and stop burning people at the stake!